How to be Happy

 Happiness studies are very badly designed, and basically we don't know.  (WSJ)

But even these studies failed to confirm that three of the five activities the researchers analyzed reliably made people happy. Studies attempting to establish that spending time in nature, meditating and exercising had either weak or inconclusive results.“The evidence just melts away when you actually look at it closely,” Dunn said.

Of the two things shown to have some evidence they actually cause happiness, either could work in the other direction. It may be that people who are already happy express gratitude or talk to strangers.

I admit I do tend to believe both of those, however.  And it makes me happy that the Scandinavians do not speak much to strangers (though they spoke to me just fine) and are routinely declared the happiest nations - which I have railed for years is a complete crock given their suicide and alcoholism rates.  Those are not world-worst by any means, but neither are they great.  They reason that they score so high is that Scandis are very defensive, even arrogant about doing things better than other nations, and they feel very resppnsible to make their countries look good. 

They are smart people and can see where these questions are going.